Kragorn wrote:
I'm afraid I'm a bit confused why there are two sets of width/height settings. Clearly one is the size of the display, in my case 1600x1200, but what's the '3D' size for?
The display size is the actual resolution of your screen (called the "Overlay" in the FFXI config util) and the 3D size is the resolution that the game draws the 3D graphics at (called the "Background" in the FFXI config util)
FFXI draws the 3D graphics independantly of the actual screen resolution. The 3D graphics are drawn to an offscreen block of display memory which is treated like a video overlay (the menus and text are drawn to the display not to this offscreen block of memory). Thus if you set your display resolution at 1280x960 and the 3D resolution at 640x480 the game will draw the 3D graphics at 640x480 and then stretch the image up to 1280x960. And like a video overlay it gets blurry when you do this (it's just like blowing up an image in photoship with bilinear interpolation scaling). When you do the opposite and draw the screen bigger than the actual display it does the exact opposite, it scales it down, this is basicly supersampling which is a form of FSAA (ideally you want an even multiple of the display resolution, because of the 2048 limit this almost always means 2x the display resolution unless you use somthing stupidly small such as 640x480 for your display size)
This is also why setting FSAA in your video card's drivers does nothing, FFXI is drawing the 3D graphics to an offscreen chunk of display memory rather than to the display buffer. When you turn on FSAA your video card FSAAs your display, which does exactly nothing because while the menus and text are all drawn to the display buffer the 3D graphics aren't and your video drivers have no way of knowing this.
Most people want to set the display size and 3D size to be exactly the same but unfortunatly FFXI's config util won't let you do this. You can set the display size to anything you want but the 3D size is limited to 256x256 (yuck) 512x512 (also yuck) or 1024x1024 (yuck if you use a display size larger than 1024x768 - and even at 1024x768 it's bad because you're drawing extra pixels for no good reason) However, you can edit the values in the registry and set it to be whatever you want. I have no idea why SE won't just allow this in the FFXI config util, it's completely retarded that it doesn't.
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Final Fantasy XI 12-14-11 Update wrote:
Adjust the resolution of menus.
The main screen resolution for "FINAL FANTASY XI" is dependent on the "Overlay Graphics Resolution" setting.
If the Overlay Graphics Resolution is set higher than the Menu Resolution, menus will be automatically resized.
I thought of it first:
http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=10&mid=130073657654872218#20